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Events

5/24 Morning Meeting

TLA Friday, May 24th Morning Meeting

Technology Leaders Association (TLA) was established in 2002 to help senior level IT executives develop and manage their careers. As part of this effort, we hold monthly meetings to network, share ideas, and learn from featured guest speakers in the strategy, information technology, and career management fields.

Our speaker for May is Eric Lannert, CTO at Cloudbakers, who will present, Navigating a Tech Career in the Cloud.

Eric is excited to share his story with the TLA network and hopes to provide some inspiration and tactical advice. In 2017, he abruptly found himself in the job market at age 47 and he quickly realized that he was getting knocked out of all the job board and algorithm screens. He needed to reinvent himself quickly.

During this talk, he will cover his reinvention journey over the last two years including:
• Types of consulting to pursue during transition
• Transferable skills
• Separating value from the hype
• Millennials
• Resources
• Cases and architecture
Date: Friday, May 24th
Where: Central States Funds, 9377 W. Higgins Road, Rosemont
Cost: No charge

For reservations, (1) Please sign up online on the TLA website (www.techleaders.net) under 'Events' - or, if you don't have access to the website, (2) Please reply to patrick.moroney@gmail.com with your name and telephone number.

Reservations must be made before noon on Thursday, May 23rd with the first 80 reservations accepted. No walk-ins please.

If you have reserved and are unable to attend, as a courtesy to our host, please send a note to Pat Moroney at patrick.moroney@gmail.com.

Directions
Central States Funds is located at 9377 W. Higgins Rd. in Rosemont at the southeast corner of River Rd. and Higgins. Enter off of the Higgins side of the corner then turn left/east to 9377. There is free visitor parking in front of the building but TLA visitors are encouraged to use the parking lot north of the 9377 building. Enter the parking garage and press the security gate button to speak to the security guard. Let the security guard know that you are attending the TLA meeting. They will raise the security gate to allow you access to the garage. You can park in any spot from the 2nd floor to the top of the garage that is not reserved. The TLA meeting will be held on the first floor in the B/C Training/Conference Room. You do not need a security badge for access to this room. There is also a full-service cafeteria near the room for anyone who wants to purchase food or beverages.

Structured Networking
Structured networking is a technique used at most major executive transition groups. It is meant to be a powerful method of generating ideas that might help each of our searches. During this process, we will quickly brainstorm potential job lead ideas, gain networking contacts at desired companies, and generate advice from the members by sharing our backgrounds as well as our career objectives. It is designed to generate ideas, but given the time constraints, not get into immediate detailed discussions. You should plan on following up with anybody who may have had an interesting idea or a good contact.
Please bring business cards, handbills (career overview) or resumes (plain paper is fine) to pass around if you have them. Figure on about 20 copies of the resumes/handbills and 50 business cards.

We will run our networking, dividing the room into small tables of a maximum of 8 people and doing 2 table rotations before our speaker begins. At each rotation, you will have 90 seconds for your pitch and about 90 seconds for Q&A. Spend no more than 1/3 summarizing your past (this is not the time to rehash your resume), then spend about 1/3 on what you are looking for and 1/3 on what we can do to help (such as target contacts) or ask for advice on an issue.

Speaker Bio

Eric Lannert is an entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in technology leadership, business operations, management and sales. He joined the Cloudbakers team as Chief Technology Officer in 2017. In this position Eric is responsible for supporting delivery teams with technology strategy, new product and service development, scalable processes, and outstanding professional development in the context of accelerating growth over 100% per year.

Eric started his journey into the world of technology at Indiana University, earning a B.A. in Finance and Computer Information Systems. His career started within the Emerging Technologies group of Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). His passion for learning kept him going to earn a Masters in Computer Science specializing in Artificial Intelligence from Northwestern University. In 1999, he went on to earning 11 U.S. Patents for his work in the field of computer simulations and goal based learning.

In 2001, Eric decided to bring his business, technology, and learning experience to the non-profit tech job training world and joined i.c.stars. For the next 16 years, Eric helped i.c.stars grow from start-up to a nationally expanding social enterprise.

Outside of the office Eric enjoys taking morning runs with his family 90Ib Boxer, Teddy, drinking red wine with his college sweetheart wife of 25 years on their porch in Andersonville, and trying to keep up with his two teenage daughters! Yet, even with his busy family life Eric still finds time to volunteer and develop STEM opportunities in CPS schools, as well as writing code to automate his house, finances, and investing!